Wednesday, March 25, 2009

From the article, "The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women," by Elizabeth Schulte (Counterpunch).

Statistics on dating violence and young women are shocking. According to the Family Violence and Prevention Fund, one in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a date, and 8 percent of high-school-age girls say that they have been forced by a boyfriend to have sex against their will. Forty percent of girls aged 14 to 17 say they know someone their age who has been hit by a boyfriend.

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, every year women in the U.S. experience 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes. According to the Bureau of Justice, 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner in 2005--an average of three women every day.

There has long been a sizable "generation gap" in newspaper readership. In 1998, those in the oldest age cohort -- the Greatest/Silent Generations (born before 1946) -- were more than twice as likely as those in the youngest generation at that time (Generation X) to read a newspaper yesterday (65% vs. 31%). Older age cohorts continue to read newspapers at much higher rates than do younger cohorts.

In the 2008 survey, slightly more than half (53%) of those in this age cohort said they read a newspaper yesterday. A decade earlier, 65% of those in the Silent/Greatest Generations did so. There also has been a large decline in the percentage of Baby Boomers who reported reading a newspaper yesterday, from 48% in 1998 to 38% a decade later.

By contrast, newspaper readership has been more stable among younger age cohorts. In 2008, 26% of those in Generation X said the read a newspaper yesterday, compared with 31% in 1998. Last year, 21% of those in Generation Y said they read a newspaper on the previous day, which was little changed from 2004 (22%).

The generational pattern in television news viewership is somewhat different: Within each age cohort, the percentages saying they watched television news yesterday have remained stable in recent years. As with newspapers, a far lower proportion of Gen Y than older age cohorts reports watching TV news on a typical day. Unlike newspapers, however, there is even a sizable gap in television news viewership between Gen Y and Gen X. In 2008, just 42% of Gen Y said they watched television news yesterday, compared with 54% of Gen X and even higher percentages of Boomers (61%) and the Silent/Greatest Generations (73%).

Like newspapers, radio news has seen a gradual overall decline over the past decade. In 2008, as in previous news consumption surveys, those in their prime working years were more likely than others to report listening to radio news yesterday. Radio news listenership was higher among Gen X (41%) and Boomers (38%) than among either the Silent/Greatest Generations (30%) or Gen Y (29%).

In contrast to traditional media sources, use of online news on a typical day has increased in recent years. Nearly all of this growth has come in Gen X (from 32% in 2006 to 38% in 2008) and Gen Y (from 24% to 33%).

...Newspaper websites are especially popular with highly educated online news consumers. More than a quarter of those who have attended graduate school (28%) cite a newspaper website as where they go most often for news and information. That compares with 16% of those with no more than a college degree and much smaller percentages of those with less education.

Gendered reading:

A recent international study suggests that girls are reading better than boys through age 15. According to the report, girls had higher reading scores in every one of 43 countries surveyed.

The survey, "Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow", was developed by UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and based on tests involving 4,500 to 10,000 students in each country.

Interestingly, the report also suggests that boys are reading less fluently because of "a lack of engagement." Statistically, 56 percent of the boys read only to get information, compared with 33 percent of the girls. However, nearly half of the girls said they read for at least thirty minutes a day, compared with less than one-third of the boys.

As expected, students living in countries with higher national incomes performed better in educational tests, including reading, math and science...The study also showed "strong relationships" between class and educational performances in countries such as Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland and the United States...

Adding to the OECD study are the following international literacy statistics reported by the Literacy Trust of England:

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

We discovered that it was only in the twentieth century, with the establishment of art history as an institutionalized academic discipline, that most art history systematically obliterated women artists from the record.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (p. 272 in Grewal and Kaplan): One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight...

In the art form of the European nude, the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the person treated as objects usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity.

In modern art the category of the nude has become less important. Artists themselves began to question it. In this, as in many other respects, Maet represented a turning point. If one compares his Olympia with titian's original, one sees a woman cast in the traditional role, beginning to question that role, somewht defiantly.

The ideal was broken. But there was little to replace it except the "realism" of the prostitute--who became the quintessential woman of early avant-garde twentieth-century painting..."

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About Me

Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.